~ if you're going through hell, keep going

question for fandom

This is not entirely out of only curiosity, but in the wake of LJ dying its ongoing slow death, the rise of tumblr & instagram, the spammy desert of delicious, and the domination of pinterest, where does fandom mostly reside, now? Outside of behemoths like fanfiction.net and deviantart, there doesn't seem to be a central gathering place (application/site) for major active communities. Or is there, and I'm just not seeing/hearing about it?

Considering that once upon a time, one could post images, fic, vids, and whatnot to LJ, on one's own journal as well as on a community journal, is there any one place that handles all the fannish activity, now? Or is it all truly broken into pieces?

There is a whole lot on Tumblr, and I'd say Tumblr + Twitter (as a sort of aggregate, each handling a somewhat different info stream) is currently as close to the fandom happening place as LJ ever was, which was always extremely variable by fandom/fan type. Tag streams rather than comms serve as gathering points, and that means you have to be a lot more plugged in to the key terms of a fandom to find it. I suspect the cyclical nature of conversation-by-reblog+addition has front lined a lot of fancrazy that the LJ platform and platform-culture channeled into locked posts, but I see a lot of the same post-it-to-your-journal type stuff going by on my dash.

I think there was a window when AO3 could have stepped in, but at the time they didn't have coders up to designing the platform and now I think there really is too much fragmentation in how different fan sets expect their platform to operate for such a polarized project to draw more than their core constituency.

The thing is, fandom is literally so huge these days I wouldn't want to use a centralized platform that puts me in touch with Every Single Fan Ever. Not that my fandom experience was ever truly centralized, since all through the reign of LJ I was in fandoms with virtually no presence on LJ, but vibrant messageboards. But anyway, these days fans of anything at all are so easy to find I suffer from a kind of glut and have to back off to somewhere smaller and more manageable. Like living in a city with hundreds of thousands of people, and cutivating my own front stoop. One of my fandoms is a Canadian show that will absolutely break the bank if it gets a million viewers, and I can find fandom for it.

On Tumblr, I tend to post about a fandom and include it in that fandom's tag, then follow the replies and retags to my post and find people to follow that way. If I want to find something (like fandom-specific icons, which are scarce as hen's teeth thanks to the lack of a standard platform icon size for people to specifically create for, the one thing I really miss LJ about) I'll use the site search to find fandom-specific curated blogs that basically wade through the fandom tag and reblog the good stuff, like garbage pickers going through junkyards for the gems.

I suspect this is not a particularly helpful response, if what you're looking for is "Go here to find fandom." But if you were asking a somewhat more philosophical question, here's a bit of anecdata and an idea or two.

There is an alternative not mentioned in the way your question is phrased. It's also possible that fandom has always been widespread, existing in various pockets of community such that it's the poly-fandom gathering in LJ was an unusual moment in fan history. Also possible is that as broadly based as LJ fandom was, there are fair sized fandoms it never included. One of the reasons I suggest this is that I ended up on LJ fairly late, and was surprised as I explored it to find very little of my then primary fandom.

That gap came up again for me rather forcefully in a recent "Guide to fanfiction for people who can't stop getting it wrong" on DailyDot. The writers talk in passing about groups of fans setting up publishers print Twilight fic with serial numbers filed off. Interesting, yes, but the writers make that sound like a singular occasion. Yet the largest lesbian publishers still in business started out publishing Xena fic, and a raft of smaller ones also grew out of the fandom and continue. (Canon in Xena includes the characters being reincarnated in a variety of times/places, so the serial number doesn't take much filing off.)

From the AO3 counts, Xena is in the small fandoms range with ~600 stories, yet there are closer to ~20k spread over the three biggest Xenafic sites, and again, a raft of smaller sites and collections.

Thing is, most of this grew through email lists, and bulletin board systems -- and has never really felt the need to move on to journals, tumblers or whatever the next sites/apps will be. That means that if one doesn't know a specific site or community exists it'll be hard to find, leaving it almost impossible to know how many fragments fandom is broken into, for how long (the Xena sites date bag to the mid 1990's), or where to find them all.

I don't for a minute think that the Xena fandom is the only one left out of, or forgotten by, the Daily Dot article. It'd not surprise me at all to find snail mail based, or zine based fandoms that were still going strong, perhaps having transitioned to email, but no further. Yet as long as fandom history gets described as a general movement from one key platform to another, the communities' real level of fragmentation cannot be assessed.

I don't know of any one central location like LJ used to be, unfortunately. The closest I've been able to come to that sort of cross-pollination now is Making Light's blog. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/

I'd have to say - from personal experience, at least - that fandom seems to have migrated to Tumblr and Twitter, although the sense of "community" is far less than what it used to be on LJ. It feels like fandom now (or at least it feels more apparent/concentrated) revolves around the individual rather than the community. This is probably due to the rise of tags as a means of gathering people's attention. So individual users (as content providers) become more prominent, since Tumblr and Twitter both seem to be "shout into the void and see who shouts loudest" models. So unless you track the tags, you don't see the "fandom," but that method doesn't represent the users who don't tag or don't appear in the tags.

As for Twitter, the emphasis on the individual is even greater. Communities slowly build as new users follow and become friends with other users - I think this is due to the nature of Twitter, where people will jump in on conversation threads, but if you don't follow some of the users listed in the Tweets, you'll only get a portion of the full conversation. So it encourages/forces you to expand your "circle" if you want to capture the entire view of the conversations taking place. So naturally, communities form around preexisting circles and established/prominent "voices" in fandom.

On a side note, Tumblr seems to have changed its tag search... In my fandom, at least, there's a lot of uproar about ship/character hate appearing in the tags, but the people posting the hate claim not to have tagged their posts. So it seems like maybe the tag search is also pulling keywords from the post content?

Kaigou, hi! About your question... I haven't found a place to do what you said yet. I can only go to Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook (Pixiv, Deviantart, FF.net, AO3)... I miss the days of Gundam Herald for example or so many other communities on LJ. Talking about GW, at least the fandom isn't dead yet, so Happy 20th Anniversary!

Thanks for all the work you shared with us, you are one of my all time favorite authors. From time to time I go to Gundam Wing Addiction to re-read Kingfisher, The Drums of Heaven, All Of Me, Howl, Nothing Like The Sun, Tetractys! I've found your work really inspiring, and for all of it I wanted to thank you.